Accepting my first credit card payment without PayPal, part 2/2

After getting accepted by the credit card processing company in Europe I got a contract from them to sign and a short 5 minute (very polite) phone call which was just a small check to verify I'm indeed a real breathing person reachable at the phone number I provided. As mentioned before, I additionally proved my identity by mailing in utility bill and passport copies.

In the book "Anything You Want" Derek Sivers, who started an online CD store, wrote a bit about how you don't need Terms & Conditions and other such boring corporate stuff for your website. Well, during this process I discovered one reason to have them, as the compliance department would not otherwise accept my sites. Additionally I had to write a privacy policy and do some other minor changes to the site. This process is needed for each "business case" - a site you want to accept credit cards on.

Next, I got a login / password to a site where I had to complete a self-assessment to indicate I know how to handle credit card details correctly. Because I am using Recurly and not touching any credit card details myself, this part was easy to fill and took less than an hour although I felt a bit intimidated to get started (what if I answer something wrong?).

Now the merchant account was open with the credit card processor, but their service could not yet talk with the recurring payments solution Recurly. A few days of confusion followed, as I had already received two sets of login / passwords from the credit card processor, but neither of those worked for interfacing with Recurly. Turned out a third set was needed just for API access.

Finally after this I could actually add the hooks to Recurly in my code. Recurly communicates payments to me by POSTing notifications in XML to an endpoint I give them. The Recurly-specific code in my case is about 50 lines of Python and 40 lines of Javascript. Things this code does is showing the payment form, taking note of new subscriptions that are created and adjusting how much candy I owe to each person as money comes in.

Money from these transactions then appears on my bank account once a week via wire transfer. Well, there you have it, a simple case of accepting credit cards from start to end. Please comment on Hacker News or email me@bemmu.com.